Picture It! Digital Image Pro 2003

At heart then, it's Picture It! Photo Standard 2003 with that program's bread-and-butter features such as being able to remove red-eye, adjust the brightness, contrast, sharpness, crop down to a specific area and so on. You can apply a wide selection of filters to transform your photos into realistic works of art that appear to have been created in different mediums, including pencil, charcoal and water colours and unlike many programs the results are excellent. You can quickly cut out a section of one photo and use it in another, add text, wrapping the words round objects in the photo, adding textures and so on. There are good batch processing features too, which allow you to rename a folder's worth of photos with a couple of mouse clicks as well as adjusting the balance, colour, contrast tint and size of a selection of pictures in one go.

Picture It! Digital Image Pro 2003 adds dozens more filters for special effects, finer editing tools for removing imperfections from scanned photos (including wrinkles!) extra brushes that let you distort photos for bizarre effects, paint freehand with many more brushstroke styles--there's even a brush which uses the program's library of photos as its "paint"--as well as a cloning brush that lets you paint over one part of a photo using a sample from another part of the same image. You also get effective tools for fixing photos that have got too-dark foregrounds or overly lit backgrounds. Is the support for PhotoShop plug-ins useful? It depends. They're not the sort of programs you'll have laying round the house and if you've bought them, then it's probably because you use PhotoShop itself. Certainly they're aimed at professional designers rather than home enthusiasts.

One last point. The program comes with that rarity, a proper printed manual, which not only describes how everything works but includes around 150 pages of hints and tips to help you get the best from your digital camera and scanner. --Rob Beattie